


our homeward step

by Dubiousculturalartifact (222Ravens)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Demisexuality, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Post-Canon, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 05:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19100578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/pseuds/Dubiousculturalartifact
Summary: In which a conversation finally takes place, rather decidedly overdue.





	our homeward step

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square'.

Their dinner is, in a single word, _perfect._

 

After paying, they walk out together into the coolness of twilight. The hum of humanity flows around them, as they step onto the pavement.

 

“This was lovely, thank you.” Crowley says, rather dangerously. Thanking each other wasn’t something they tried to be in the habit of. Only, perhaps that was then, and this was now, and Aziraphale had paid. So it was only fair for the thanks to be given. Perhaps.

 

“If you’d like to drive me back, I… I wouldn’t mind that.” Aziraphale says in turn, and the significance of the offer is not altogether lost on Crowley.

 

It didn’t matter that they hadn’t come in the car, really. The Bentley would be where Crowley decided it was, because that was simply how these things worked.

 

Crowley looks down the street, then up and the sky, and smiles, crookedly. “Nah. I’ll walk you home, how about that?”

 

So they on walk, two abreast, in no particular direction. There’s a general direction they are pointed towards, but they meander, taking this street, and then the next, neither of them quite willing to call the end of the evening.

 

Eventually, the conversation turns, as it is wont to do when one experiences a near-miss with calamity, to the undone things.

 

“I’ve been thinking.” Aziraphale begins, picking carefully around the words, in order to find precisely the right ones.

 

“That could be dangerous.” Crowley quips, flicking a finger out to turn the light from red to green, as they approach to cross.

 

There’s a faint screech of tires, from a narrowly averted accident. Aziraphale winces in an absent-sort of way, but doesn’t appear to notice particularly, otherwise.

 

“About what you said. Regarding sides, and about the idea that there could be a side that might be… ours, so to speak. Neither Heaven nor Hell, but a sort of third option.”

 

“Right, mhmm, yes.” Crowley is abruptly aware that there is a fragility to this moment, somehow, and is entirely careful not to pry terribly hard, or to push the conversation in any particular direction. However it ends up, he owes Aziraphale that much, at the least.

 

“It’s just that when I really think about it, there’s a great deal of things on this earth that I’ve yet to properly experience. Seems silly, isn’t it? To live all this time and have been rather too set in one’s ways to branch out from a specific set of options for oneself.” Aziraphale says.

 

Crowley has a great deal he could say. Instead, he merely arcs one careful eyebrow, half-hidden under glasses and the growing twilight, and says, “Oh?”

 

Aziraphale tenses, and then doesn’t panic, _exactly_. But he certainly does his level best, in delaying the point in which the conversation gets to the specifics. “Well, Burmese food, for example! I’ve never actually tried it, somehow.”

 

“Not once? We’ll have to arrange that, haven’t we? There’s a lovely little place I went to in America on a business trip a few years ago, had this salad made with fermented tea leaves. Thought of you when I was reading the menu, actually.”

 

“How delightful!” Aziraphale says, and genuinely means it.

 

Crowley tries to content himself with that, for the time being. Walking with this angel, in a world that will, for the time being, continue spinning. If he gets nothing else in the world, no greater pleasures or cosmic reward, then surely that would be enough, no matter how much he _wants._

 

They walk in silence for another moment, before Aziraphale tries again, sounding a trifle wistful. “You’ve even had Burmese food. There we have it, then. I’m at a disadvantage, between the two of us. I am sure there are… Well. Lots of things that you’ve done, that I haven’t had the occasion to.”

 

“What, dancing or something? You can still do the gavotte, can’t you? Mind, it’s got nothing on disco for style, but there’s bound to be…” Crowley trails off, suddenly feeling as if he’s on uneven footing.

 

Aziraphale sighs, looking rather put out, in the way that someone does, when they are trying to have a difficult conversation, and neither party is entirely allowing the conversation to be had. “Not dancing, no. Besides, the gavotte has gone out of style, apparently .”

 

“I’m sure you’d still dance it splendidly.” 

 

Aziraphale looks flustered for a moment. “Well, thank you, but that’s really not the point. I meant, well, you know...” Aziraphale clarifies, raising an octave, _“that sort of thing_.”

 

“What… Drugs? Oh, well who didn’t, in the seventies…” Crowley gestures with long, slender fingers, keeping his voice deliberately light.

 

“No, not drugs…” Aziraphale purses his lips, looking almost hurt, then whispers, “You know… _Entanglements._ ”

 

“Oh! _That_ sort of thing.” Crowley says, in an odd tone of voice. “I. I actually haven’t tried it.”

 

“What, not even once? But da Vinci, he made you that lovely painting...”

 

“Nope.” Crowley half-snarls, popping the ‘p’ consonant rather abruptly. He feels unsteady. As if they are veering into dangerous territory, but equally as if he isn’t at all inclined, to try and get them out of it. Not yet, anyway.

 

Aziraphale thinks for a moment, before he alights on a different option. “Oscar Wilde, then! I saw the two of you together at that party in 1889. You looked rather... cozy.” he suggests, pronouncing the last sentence in the usual way one says ‘the neighbours have decided to paint their house lime green with magenta trimmings,’ or something equally distasteful.

 

“Well, no, No, we didn’t. I haven’t. He actually was rather busy looking at _you_ , during most of the party.” Crowley said, with the _something we both had in common_ left only slightly unsaid.

 

They keep walking, the silence suddenly a little thicker, until Aziraphale allows himself to break it. “I’m sorry to have presumed. It’s just that well, you are a demon, and that sort of thing is considered in certain circles to rather be part of the territory, and so I admit that I _wondered_ , a little, whether…”

 

“Yes, well. It’s not that I _wouldn’t_ , probably. It just that the circumstances would have to be right. And they hadn’t been.Not even the once.” Crowley says, like he can’t quite believe he’s admitting it.

 

“Why didn’t you? Why resist that one particular kind of… temptation, of all of them?” Aziraphale asks.

 

“Always told myself I was above it. Just a… weird sort of human thing, and I didn’t need to dabble, in any of that nonsense.” He looks up at the trees, as if vastly fascinated by the pattern of their leaves, silhouetted against the street-lamps.

 

Aziraphale keeps his eyes more firmly on ground level, as he prods, “You’ve dabbled in plenty of other things. What’s the _real_ reason?”

 

There was a moment, eleven years ago, when Crowley could have simply not told Aziraphale something, and things would have been rather utterly different. There was a moment, only a few days ago, when Crowley could have left entirely, could have run away and never looked back, the way he had promised he would, and things would have also been rather utterly different.

 

Life on Earth, Crowley had come to realize, was almost entirely about choices. Moments on which things can hinge. Entire worlds, entire lives. This moment, he suspects, is one of them. He can tell a lie, as all demons do. Twist trust and fact alike, let the possibilities of this conversation dissipate into the air, and nothing between them will change.

 

Crowley has never been a terribly good demon.

 

So he chooses truth.

 

“Because of _you._ ” Crowley admits, in a voice that was a great deal quieter than his usual.

 

Aziraphale did not precisely stop walking, did not so much as slow in his pace, but there was an emotional journey that corresponded to approximately the same effect, playing out across his face.

 

“Oh!” he said, in a voice that was an pitch or two rather louder than his usual.

 

“It’s always been because of you, angel.” Crowley says, rolling back his shoulders as he walked. “I think, perhaps deep down… Almost all of it, has been.”

 

“My dear Crowley…” Aziraphale breathes. “I feel quite the same way.”

 

He is clearer and surer in his answer, than he has been about anything in his six thousand year existence.

 

They both look at each other, for a long, long moment, in which an eternity of other moments are summed up, neatly. Neither of them move first. But in a paraphrase of words Galileo never actually said…

 

And yet, they _moved_. Their hands touch, their fingers intertwine. It is a statement, and a gesture, all at once.

 

“So that’s that, then.” Aziraphale remarks, his expression little short of beatific.

 

“Suppose so.” Crowley says, and smiles back. There are no teeth in it, no edge. Only starlight, and opening possibility, as they continue their walk home, in perfect understanding of each other.

 

—

 

In some respects, a great deal changes, after that. In other respects, hardly anything at all does, in that precise moment, or on any particularly fundamental level, thereafter.

 

They are the beings they have always been, and who they are to each other was settled as fact a long time ago, even if neither of them had quite the grace to admit it.

 

Some things are ineffable.

 

Others, perhaps, are _inevitable._

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes:
> 
> -The tea leaf salad Crowley describes is real, and extremely delicious. The recipe I have tasted in particular comes from the restaurant Burma Superstar in California, and requires multiple days of fermentation, as well as a number of equally fussy ingredients. I like to think Aziraphale would enjoy it.
> 
> -1889 is one year prior to the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. One may view this as coincidence, or not, according to one's own preferences.
> 
> -"And yet it moves" or "Albeit it does move" is a phrase attributed to the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei in 1633 after being forced to recant his claims that the Earth moves around the immovable Sun, rather than the converse. He may have said it. He may not have said it, but truth is a matter of perspective, and sometimes what matters is what makes for a good story.
> 
> I'm @DubiousCA on twitter.


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